If Your Child Trips on Drugs, What Next?

By Marlene Cimons

L.A. Times/Washington Post Service WASHINGTON William

Z. was 17 when his parents found out he was tripping on LSD. His father, an assembly line worker is Los Angeles, called the narcotics officers.

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The youth was put in jail for two days and then transferred to juvenile hall. During his confinement he was beaten up twice and forced into a homosexual experience. When he was released, he refused to have anything to do with his family.

Betty R., 15, smoked marijuana in the bathroom of her San Francisco home. Her mother, president of the local PTA, noticed the sweet odor and called the girl's stockbroker father home from work in the middle of the day.

SHOCKED, their first impulse was to call the police. After calming down, however, they called a doctor who advised them to sit down and have a talk with their daughter. They did. The girl, who had never before experimented with drugs, decided to stop.

The names are fictionalized and the situations are simplified. But both cases are true. They are among a number of cases handled by Dr. Joel Fort, one of the world's leading experts on drug use and abuse and an early crusader in the reform of drug laws.

He feels that both situations illustrate the ways in which a family can deal with a drug problem and the possible results.

FORT, WHO teaches in the School of Social Welfare at Berkeley and was here recently for a drug conference sponsored by Playboy magazine, is firmly convinced that parents who snoop, accuse and condemn their children for using drugs will do more harm

than good.

"The most important thing for parents is not to allow themselves to be turned into policemen," he said. "This is what some police departments... are trying to do. They tell parents and teachers to look for reddened eyes, inattentiveness, poor grades and unusual behavior. How vague. With symptom s like that, the youth could be in love."

Women's City Club The "Background of the

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A parent who overreacts, he said, will impair the family relationship and probably do more to encourage drug use than stop it. "Concern should be expressed in a positiv e, constructive way,” he said.

"THE FIRST thing a family must be aware of is what ily must be aware of is what a drug is," Fort said. "The word drug has an emotional connotation and it is misleading to most parents and older Americans. Drugs include aspirin, sleeping pills and diet pills.

"Mind altering drugs include nicotine and alcohol; many things that people take all the time. But if we call something a medicine, beverage or cigaret, we react differently than if we call it a drug."

Fort, the author of "The Pleasure Seekers: The Drug Crisis, Youth and Society," believes that a parent who calls the police is doing the most damaging thing possible.

"This would destroy a child's life much more than drugs could," he said. "It will turn him against his parents, and result in possible expulsion from school, or imprisonment. Instead of getting rehabilitation, he will be given a post-graduate course in real crime."

FORT SAID that drug use is particularly immense on the West Coast. "The United States as a whole is drugridden nation and California leads the nation," he said. "It leads in the use and abuse of mind altering drugs. It is the alcoholism capital of America.

"It uses more sleeping pills, stimulants, more tobacco, more marijuana and more LSD-type drugs than any other state. It's politicians have been less effective in dealing with the problem because they have preferred rhetoric and public relations to a real solution."

He attributes the large use of drugs in California to the greater production and availability of drugs in the state as well as what he called a life style of "intense pleasure-seeking.”

"THERE ARE fewer family ties here," he said. "The climate provides for greater openness and more neglect by parents of their children. There is a feeling of greater freedom. And there is also a strong reaction by the young people against the hypocrisy and extremism of the drug laws

and the politicians."

Fort has been a controversial figure in California. In 1965 he created the Center for Special Problems in San Francisco, a program which provided comprehensive treatment for all forms of drug abuse, sexual problems, crime and the first to provide special services for the hippies, the

poor, minority groups, youth and middle-class adults with special social and health problems.

HE WAS dismissed in 1967 by the chief administrative officer of the city. "I'm told it was for being too independent and for having views on drug and sex problems which were different from police views," he said.

He is now fighting this dismissal in the courts.

"The biggest problem in America today is the institu tional pollution," he said. "A crisis in mediocrity and senility. The bureaucracy must humanize the problems before they can deal with them. The approach must be human. This hasn't happened."

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